Will Smith

Will Smith is an American actor, producer, and author whose memoir Will offers a candid account of his rise from West Philadelphia to global celebrity, and the inner life beneath the public persona.

Will Smith is one of the most commercially successful entertainers in American history — rapper, television star, and global box-office draw across three decades. Will (2021), written with Mark Manson (author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck), was published before the 2022 Academy Awards incident that dominated subsequent discussion of Smith’s public image, and its candour about his psychological life, family history, and personal failures takes on additional resonance given subsequent events.

The memoir is more honestly self-critical than most celebrity autobiographies. Smith writes candidly about his relationship with his father (who was abusive toward his mother), his sense that the “Will Smith” persona he constructed was a performance designed to win love rather than an expression of genuine identity, and the tensions in his marriage to Jada Pinkett Smith. The passages examining his workaholic drive as an anxiety response and his use of success as emotional regulation are genuinely probing, and Manson’s influence may account for the book’s willingness to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it neatly.

The book was published before Smith’s slap of Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars, an incident that unavoidably colours any reading of its themes. The contrast between the book’s portrait of a man working through his relationship to anger and the public incident that followed has generated commentary that the memoir cannot address. Readers can engage with Will as a pre-incident document — which it is — or read it alongside knowledge of subsequent events. Either way, it is more substantial than most celebrity memoirs and more honest than most would dare to be.